Meaning, Understanding, and Quantification in the History of Ideas
University of Chicago, April 28, 2023
Section 1: Background
Word Counts: Good Enough?
- 4 keywords per section:
| Section | Keywords |
|---|---|
| U.S. | state, court, federal, republican |
| World | government, country, officials, minister |
| Arts | music, show, art, dance |
| Sports | game, league, team, coach |
| Real Estate | home, bedrooms, bathrooms, building |
- For each article, vote for section with highest keyword count:
| Arts | Real Estate | Sports | U.S. News | World News | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Correct | 3020 | 690 | 4860 | 1330 | 1730 | 11630 |
| Incorrect | 750 | 60 | 370 | 1100 | 590 | 2870 |
| Accuracy | 0.801 | 0.920 | 0.929 | 0.547 | 0.746 | 0.802 |
What’s Missing?
…Context!
You shall know a word by the company it keeps.
President Bush said he was trying to convince President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that cooperation was “in Russia’s security interests,” even though Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates did not win Mr. Putin’s support during a trip to Moscow last week.
“Bush Steps Up Effort to Persuade Putin on Missile Defense Plan”, NYTimes, 1 May 2007.
President Bush began his day yesterday at dawn on the golf course. He began Saturday on the golf course, too. A weekend earlier, the president played two rounds of 18 holes on the course at Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington.
“White House Letter; Bush Makes Quick Work of Relaxing”, NYTimes, 5 August 2002.
The Cambridge School and Contextual History
- What are political actors doing with words?
- “condemning, opposing, resisting, demanding, beseeching, supporting, rewarding […] attacking, expelling, cursing, cheering, singing” (Tilly 2008)
Illocutions and Perlocutions
Section 2: Models of Meaning and Context
Raw Word Embeddings
- What do they “mean”?
Manually-Projected Word Embeddings
- Researcher imposes meaning
Clustered Word Embeddings
- Continuous Spectra \(\rightarrow\) Discrete Clusters
The Geometry of Political Thought
Hobbes’s analysis of liberty in Leviathan represents not a revision but a repudiation of what he had earlier argued, […] a substantial change in the character of his moral thought.
The 1844 Marx was still operating within the ideological field of Young Hegelianism.
[Khomeini] now used [mostazafin] to mean the angry ‘oppressed masses’, a meaning it had acquired in the early 1960s when [Ali] Shariati and his disciples translated Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as Mostazafin-e Zamin.
Constructing Contextual Fields
- Word2Vec
- BERT
The Empirics of Influence: Historical Sketches
- Structure vs. Agency
- Case Studies
- Text-Mining Influence Claims
- History of Marxism
Text-Mining Influence Claims
- “\(X\) influenced \(Y\)”? Let’s zoom in on mechanisms:
- Collaboration: “Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels carried on one of the great intellectual collaborations in the history of scientific research.” (Gandy 1979, ii)
- Mentorship: for example, “the grandly-titled was begun in 1915 following Wittgenstein’s tenure at Cambridge under [Bertrand] Russell’s mentorship” (Wright 2006, 72)
- Reading: for example, ``Not only had Marx read Hegel’s in 1858, but we know that he studied it once again in 1860.’’ (Dussel 2002, 195)
- Shared Intellectual Community: “Schelling and Hegel first met at the Tübingen Seminary in 1790, and the two young men shared a room there during their student years” (Levine 2006, 124)
- Shared Geography: for example, ``Lenin was an occasional visitor in Vienna. Hitler, like Trotsky, had lived there for years.” (Morton 1990, 290)
- Rivalry: for example, ``the cultural philosophy of the Historical School and, more particularly, of Hegel’s rival at the University of Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher.” (Toews 1985, 7)
The Point is To Change It
- Theoretical Innovation \(\overset{?}{\longleftrightarrow}\) Political Practice
Thank You!
- Questions?